Decentralizing the Chilean Miracle: Regional Intergenerational Mobility in a Developing Country

Abstract

We estimate spatially disaggregated measures of intergenerational mobility in Chile through an administrative dataset linking children’s and their parents’ earnings from the formal private labour sector. We report remarkable heterogeneity as we find higher and lower upward mobility in mining and agricultural regions, respectively, corroborating Connolly et al. (2019) with the distinction that Chile is a unitary state, implying that factors other than institutional differences shape mobility.

Keywords: Intergenerational Mobility, Administrative Data-Based Intergenerational Mobility, Regional Intergenerational Mobility, Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility

JEL Classification: J31, J61, J62